The Toast Rack ….. places I remember with affection

I remember vividly the first time I saw the Hollings Building in Fallowfield.*

Early morning Toast Rack, 2026

I was on one of the 40s from Withington heading towards the Oxford Road Corridor and in my case on to the city centre.

"Toast Rack" and "Fried Egg", 1959

The building was just nine years old back then and I pondered on its likeness to a toast rack.  

But then I wasn’t alone because the nickname the "Toast Rack" was pretty much what everyone called it. 

And by extension the low roundish former restaurant block on its the west side was known as the "Poached or Fried Egg” a name that I only discovered recently.

It opened in 1960 as the Domestic Trades College, became part of Manchester Polytechnic in 1977 and then part of Manchester Metropolitan University until the MMU vacated the site thirty-six years later.

Along the way it picked up a Grade II listed status and was mentioned favourably by  Nikolaus Pevsner.

I did visit it once but alas can’t now say why.  I might have been calling on a friend or attending a meeting, but I do remember marvelling at its design and in particular the differing size teaching area which were dictated by the design, but which offered up flexibility in the provision rooms for different class sizes.

That soaring shape, 1973

Not surprisingly the building has many fans as well as a few detractors and often crops up in articles of modern architecture, iconic Manchester buildings and has its own Wikipedia entry.*

From a far, 1959

So mindful of all those that have gone before me and not wanting to crib their research I will leave it at that, other than to say it was bought in 2014 for a pile of money and as of 2023 has planning permission for a mixed development and if I am right now sports a gym.

There will be those that mutter "Oh not another person discovering the Toast Rack" to which I will just say I discovered it 57 years ago but only just got round to writing about it.

And that is a shame because it is one of my favourite  buildings, playful but full of bold design.

Location; Fallowfield

Picture, Early morning Toast Rack, at 7 am courtesy of BJS, 2026 and the Toast Rack, 1959, M63957, and M63959 1959 and in 1973 M63959, courtesy of Manchester Libraries, Information and Archives, Manchester City Council, http://images.manchester.gov.uk/index.php?session=pass

*The Toast Rack (Building), https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toast_Rack_(building)

Looking for "June" The Ladies hairdresser and Busy Bee Stores, sometime in 1930

Looking "June" the Hairdressers on Wilbraham Road

I never underestimate the power of a collection of old local adverts to offer up fascinating stories and pretty much take you all over the place.

So here in front of me are a set of those adverts which appeared on the dust jacket of a book lent out by Mr R. Greig Wilson who owned a newsagents on Sandy Lane and also ran one of our Circulating libraries.

Now circulating libraries were private affairs and existed alongside the local public library, and such was the demand for novels and lighter factual material that many of our newsagents went into business renting books out.

Busy Bee

At home in London mother was a regular at the local bookshop who also traded in lending copies and across Chorlton there were quite a few, from the one that operated on Beech Road, to Mr Lloyd’s on
Upper Chorlton Road and of course R. Greig Wilson’s on Sandy Lane.

It is a topic I have visited quite a few times over the years and no doubt will return to.

But for today my attention has been drawn to Busy Bee Stores  (W. Wellard, Proprietor) at 264 Upper Chorlton Road, and “June” The Ladies’ Hairdresser and Beauty Specialist on Broadwalk Wilbraham Road.

It will take some time to date the collection of adverts and that will involve trawling the directories but I think they will be from the 1930s.

Not that Mr Grieg has been much of a help for he was selling his “Stationary, Tobacco and Picture postcards” along with delivering his newspapers from at least 1911.

That said it will be after 1911 because down on Upper Chorlton Road at 264 was a Mr John Joseph Taylor who was a tailor.

Now Mr Wellard was trading as an iron monger at the shop by 1929 and Charles Slightman who also advertised on the dust cover was selling his newspapers and lending out his collection of over 1,000 books from his lending library on Manchester Road from 1923 through to 1935 so we are in the right decade and a bit.

"June"

And until those directories yield up a definite date I am settling for sometime in the 1930s for it was around then that “June” at the Broadwalk began Permanent Waving by the Nestlé System which was the "Radione" system in which the hair was wound dry and inserted into hollow cellophane tubes sealed at both ends, but contained moistened paper”*

Long along Wilbraham Road circa 1930s

She was in her saloon at 523 Wilbraham Road by 1929 but Karl Nessler who had perfected his alternative method of curling hair in 1905 using a mixture of cow urine and water did not come up with the improvement which he called the Nestlé System until the 30’s.

“June” charged 20/- for the process and also offered "Tinting, Manicure, Face Massage , [and] all kinds of hair work carried out by experts.”

I have often wondered whether her customers were aware that Mr Nessler had arrived in Britain from Germany in 1901 and facing being interned when the Great War broke out fled to America, or that during his first experiments on his wife he managed to burn her hair off and cause some scalp burns.

That advert for an early perm, circa 1905

All of which is a complete digression but is one of the fascinating little journeys behind which there is a serious point because together the eleven adverts will reveal a little bit more about the Chorlton of just eighty or so years ago.

And in one of those nice little twist of coincidences, 264 Upper Chorlton Road is again a hardware store specialising in much the same stuff as Busy Bee which along with offering “Glass and China [as] a speciality offered “Electric Vacuum cleaners for Hire.”

But there the coincidences stop for now where “June" permed and manicured the present proprietor offers sweets and newspapers which I suppose has almost brought us full circle.

Pictures, adverts from the dust cover of a book courtesy of Margaret Connelly, Wilbraham Road in 2014 from the collection of Andy Robertson and an  early 20th century advertisement for Nessler's permanent wave machine, transferred by SreeBot, Wikipedia

*Perm (hairstyle), https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perm_(hairstyle)

Homecomings, 1945

I think these will be the last of the pictures from Belleville for a while.

Now I do have more from the collection of Mike Dufresne but these two perfectly tell the story of the return of the Hastings and Prince Edward  Regiment from its war in Europe.

The regiment left Canada for Britain soon after the war began and saw action in France, Italy and Holland and returned to Belleville Ontario in the autumn of 1945.

I have featured five of the photographs from the collection and each has its own story or perhaps stories, and while there are more pictures I think these pretty much make closure. 

And like all good photographs after you have taken in the image with these two you wonder what else there is.  Now if truth were known I don’t have a clue what else lies hidden.

For a start I don’t know who any of the people are and nor do I know what happened to them so we are left with just asking questions.

Of the four men one is in civilian clothes and yet he appears to share a bond with the other three.  

So are they comrades, and was he invalided out due to an injury?  

Which begs the question of whether the tiny lapel badge is significant?

The military ribbons on the other three testify to the action they have seen but all that is now in the past, and with all the fuss and noise of a homecoming with the town turned out to meet the regiment these four have sought each other out. 

I would like to know what interests them so much about the flag and the detail one of the soldiers is pointing to and for that matter what is being said.

Perhaps it is just a posed shot but there is something in the gaze of one of the four which leads me to think it is more than just a rehearsed photograph.

In the same way I am drawn to the other picture.  The couple stare in a relaxed way at the camera while around them men disembark from the train.

They seem perfectly at ease on that railway station and what I like about the picture is that you have a sense they have been caught in mid motion stopping just for a minue at the request of the photographer.  

And if it does not seem fanciful you half expect them to move off , thanking the photographer and mumbling something about having somehere to go.

There is much more that I could say about these two but none of it would be based on historical research, so I shall just leave them to their reunion on a pleasant sunny day sometime in 1945.

Pictures; courtesy of Mike Dufresne

Wishing you were here.......Eltham in the past, Nu 1 walking up to Shooters Hill in 1873

An occasional series which is short on words and just lets your imagination roam.

This is a section of the OS map for Kent First Edition, 1858-73.

If like me you enjoy looking at maps and plotting journeys, I leave you with it.

Picture; detail from the OS map of Kent 1858-73, sheet 02

"The growth of antisemitism, the rise of economic nationalism" ………. from the perspective of 1938

I have come back to a book I first read over thirty years ago, and it seems as relevant today as it was when it was published in 1938.

It was written by Louis Golding, who was a very successful novelist as well as literary critic, essayist and film script writer.

He was born in Manchester in1895 to a Ukrainian-Jewish family, described his politics as “strongly to the left” and in 1938 wrote The Jewish Problem which was published as a Penguin Special.

The book examines the history of antisemitism, and Zionism, against the backdrop of “The Nazi Horror” and concludes with a final chapter on  “The Future”.

Reading that last chapter, written in 1938, before the outbreak of the last world war, and the Holocaust is not easy reading.

"A JEW cannot be blamed if, as he considers the present condition of his people, his heart is filled with despair. German Jewry, one of the oldest and most solidly established in Europe has been completely overwhelmed.  Another great Jewry has followed that of Germany into the chasm, within the past few months, with catastrophic suddenness; Jewry strains its eyes, in an agony of apprehension, to know who goes next.

The great Jewish masses of eastern Europe, above all, are in peril.  Today the doom involves more than half a million souls.  What if tomorrow it should involve five millions?  The prospect is too mournful to contemplate, but it is so far from remote that it must be contemplated.
The growth of anti-Semitism, the rise of economic nationalism, and the dark shadow of unemployment have made it increasingly difficult for even refugees from central Europe to find  a haven elsewhere.”*

There will be some who dismiss re reading the book, given that we know what happened, but that is the point, knowing what happened makes reading the book all the more relevant.

And that of course is set against the rising tide of antisemitism, the small but none the less active group of Holocaust deniers, and that bunch that set out to argue that the present wave of antisemitic attacks with reference to Israel, which of course by extension falls into that obscene logic of blaming antisemitism on the Jews.

So, having read this book I am also interested in Mr. Golding, and have on order, Magnolia Street, written in 1933, and set in the High Town area of Manchester a decade earlier.  It too is a book I read along time ago and while I am at it, I will also look out his films.

Picture; the cover of The Jewish Problem 

* The Jewish Problem, Louis Golding, November 1938, reprinted, November 1938, and January 1939

Derrick Lea ….. the man who drew Manchester

Today I have been reunited with Mr. Derrek Lea who drew Manchester in the 1950s and 60s.

St. Ann's Square, Manchester, circa 1950s-60s

His images include many of our iconic buildings as well as Chorlton where he lived and out into the leafy suburbs.

Piccadilly, Manchester, circa 1950s-60s

His work is instantly recognisable and crops up across social media, and yet most of his pictures are not attributed, and that is a great shame.

I first came across a collection of his Chorlton and Didsbury scenes which had had been marketed as picture postcards, and a few more from a calendar and while Mr. Lea was credited I could find little about him.

From the style and the clothes and cars I guessed most were drawn into the 1950s and into the next decade, but apart from a reference in a directory to an address in Chorlton he remained an elusive fellow.

Not that it stopped me reproducing his pictures on the blog and while I credited him no one came forward to tell me more about this remarkable artist.

Until a few weeks ago when the wife of his son contacted me with "Hi Andrew - you have written a blog about my father-in-law … Derrick Lea.   His son has tried to contact you. I thought it was wonderful that someone had looked and researched the life of Derrick and I knew it would be amazing for you to actually meet Derrick's son".

Mr. Derrick Lea, undated

And it was, because Jon Lea not only filled me in on his dad’s life, but shared three albums of Derrick’s work.  They spanned his war time service with the RAF in Africa, his stay in various Manchester hospitals and of course those prints of the city.

Piccadilly, Manchester, circa 1960s

He was a prolific artist working in water colours, line drawings and prints which are accompanied with letters, official notes and his own observations and comments.

It was a smashing hour and half in which the conversation ranged over his dad’s early life, his work as a commercial artist and the question of how best to preserve the collection.

And Jon followed it up yesterday by sending over a wide selection of scanned copies of the pictures.

In return with Jon’s permission the images will be posted on the blog, and unlike some artists I have featured, Mr. Lea went out and drew and painted his pictures in situ which makes them a wonderful historic record and unique in that they are not based on photographs and so add to our knowledge.

John Rylands Library, Manchester, circa 1950s-60s

The difficulty then became what pictures to use for the first of the series.  I know I should have asked Jon and Hazel and for future stories I will approach them, but today I just chose four that resonate with me.

Leaving me just to thank Jon and Hazel for making the effort to contact me and then to share this wonderful collection.

Pictures; St Ann’s Square, Piccadilly and the John Rylands Library, circa 1950s-60

Next; Mr. Lea's life

Spots of Lights: Women in the Holocaust ...... an online exhibition ..... one to view

An important new exhition Spots of Light.*

"The Holocaust was a watershed event in human history – an act of murder and violence that the Nazis and their accomplices unleashed against the Jewish people. 

Death awaited all who professed the Jewish faith, and the path to this denouement was paved with ghastly violence. In certain respects, however, women, men, and children followed different paths to death.

 In this exhibition we attempt to reveal the human story that lurks behind the historical account of what happened. Within this story, we chose to tell about the Jewish victims and create space for the unique voice of the women among them".

*Spots of Light: Women in the Holocaust, https://wwv.yadvashem.org/yv/en/exhibitions/women-in-the-holocaust/index.asp

**Yad Vashen News, https://trailer.web-view.net/Show/0X4E1D458259BD54E71004CF2497F58A57E931A597041167D73457FFF0FB57D3AAFC7B75182448CBB4.htm